I was going to start separate thread about this question but there are like 458 Bargnani threads currently anyway....

One thing keeps gnawing at me.....It is one thing to say that Bargnani needs to man up and that he's not trying when it comes to rebounding and help defense. That means you can continue to work with him. one day a l ight goes on, one day there's more fire in his belly, one day he says even when my jump shot is failing, there is so much more I can do for this team.

But what if.....he's...just...not...capable. Reggie's not capable of dropping 30, Demar's not capable of pulling down 20 boards, I can't be sure Bargnani is actually capable physically and mentally to do what we are all screaming for, at least not for more than a game or 2.

That's what I always tend to come back to. What if he's just not the player we all (mostly) thought he was or could be?

When he does succeed it is usually due to having a great deal of space to operate on both ends, and just the right pace to the game. If he can be left alone to take a dribble and step into his shot he's gold. And he can defend if the offense in front of him does not involve his guy all that much. When conditions are just so and he feels perfectly comfortable, he can do what is expected of his talent level. There are no fadeaways. He'll get a few dunks, and he'll get after a few boards that don't fall into his lap. But once the schedule wears him down, teams start to play him physically, and the pace of games slows into more of a mid-season grind, the light never comes on. He starts to lose all electricity. He has nothing that he can rely on. And so up go the fadeaways, the wild shots, the reliance on stiff-legged 3-pointers.

It's just all-or-nothing. And it's too hard to go into the bulk of NBA games with everything just so. He needed to figure out how to make some kind of impact in games one way or another a long time ago. Instead he relied on waiting for his game to heat up for a stretch when he played a good number of minutes. It's just the wrong approach. He's not good enough to pull that off like a Lamar Odom does. But it's always going to be the way he approaches the game. Therein lies my disgust. It's a terrible waste.